good editorial seen on smartdykes.com -- what do you all think?
Lack of Money Keeps Lesbians Out of Prime Time

By Cameron Lee
San Francisco Chronicle
Straight people love to talk about gay people. Gay marriage, who is and is not gay, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." I'll come clean: It sticks in my craw, for two reasons.

First, these casual comments misrepresent gayness and don't invite gay opinion. Second, when people say "gay," they often think they mean gay and lesbian but really just mean gay. Gay men, and even lesbians, can be guilty of this misusage.

When people talk about neighborhoods, "lifestyle," TV and film, they're talking about gay male culture. Everyone knows where gay men live. You can't miss the rainbow flags. No one, sometimes not even lesbians, knows where lesbians live.

There are gay affairs recounted in the New York Times Style section, but "society lesbians" sounds rather like an oxymoron. Quality films from around the world have gay plots. I am hard-pressed to think of any world-class lesbian films, or any films in which the lesbians are lesbians from beginning to end.

Gay men are the protagonists of hit TV shows like "Queer Eye" and "Will & Grace." Lesbians rarely appear even in minor roles. "Will & Grace" persistently makes lesbians the brunt of "ugly" jokes, but rarely bothers to introduce lesbian characters.

"What about 'The L Word'?" you ask. The characters -- ultra-feminine members of the arts elite who discuss Brazilian waxes over lattes -- are female incarnations of salable gay male stereotypes. The show's L.A. setting gives it an alibi for refusing to put lesbians who look like lesbians on TV.

Gay and lesbian worlds are, in reality, both separate and different. The reason is obvious but rarely discussed: money.
M.V. Lee Badgett tackled the income gap in a 1998 study, which remains essentially unchallenged. Her analysis reveals that lesbians consistently earn less than gay men. Gay couples' incomes closely resemble those of married heterosexual couples; lesbian couples earn 20 percent less on average.

Lesbians' lack of disposable income directly accounts for the absence of lesbian neighborhoods and vacation spots. It also helps account for lesbians' chronic lack of bars (and bars, love them or hate them, are the basic unit of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender [GLBT] public cultures).

Take Seattle, a second-tier lesbian city, for example. It has 14 gay bars and two mixed clubs that average 70 percent men. It has one lesbian bar and two monthly lesbian events.

The gay bars do booming business, and many have recently expanded. Martha Manning, co-owner of Seattle's only full-time lesbian bar, the Wild Rose, confesses, "It is a struggle staying in business."

If we look at gay and lesbian cultures in a historical light, the difference in income looms even larger. Men have always had financial independence. Even now, women earn significantly less than men.

Between 1910 and 1940, only about 25 percent of women worked. Without money to spend, there was no way for lesbians to establish public culture. The lack of lesbian public space isn't just a temporary situation; it is a defining fact of lesbian existence.

Gay bars were abundant in major cities well before World War II. The first lesbian bars cropped up during the war, when working-class women could first earn a living for themselves.

Police dealt aggressively with bar patrons in the 1940s, and middle-class women felt out of place in the rough-and-tumble bar culture that developed.

They rarely braved the loss of their class-bound respectability -- and, with it, their middle-class jobs -- that would result from going to these bars.

Historians of lesbian culture consider it a given that open lesbianism and middle-class women simply didn't go together. There are, however, a few brief moments in which the two almost crossed. They are the most well documented moments in lesbian history, but they are also exceptions that prove the rule.

Around the turn of the 20th century, many upper-middle-class, college- educated women chose to live in pairs, ostensibly so that both could devote themselves to shared charity work. They could get away with living together because it seemed impossible that women -- or, rather, ladies -- would have sex together.

In the 1920s, bohemian women could be fashionably bisexual without penalty in their social circles but could not come out as lesbians. Even bisexuality was tolerable only in Greenwich Village, which was largely gay, and Harlem, where the well-off went to "slum it."

Feminism in the 1970s was largely a middle-class phenomenon and put lesbians on the map. Yet many feminists identified as lesbians more as a political statement than an expression of immutable desire. They tended, like the decent middle-class women they were, to turn their noses up at sex. Their strongest rejection of middle-class values was their idealization of manual labor. What limited visibility lesbianism relied on, as in the 20s, was downward mobility.

Charity work, bohemianism, working-class culture: These enduring affinities reveal that out lesbianism has long been at odds with middle-class values and income.

The mutual exclusivity of lesbians and the middle class does not mean that there are no lesbians who get by in the middle-class world. It means that lesbians can become part of public culture only to the extent that they turn away from their own culture. Lesbians as lesbians have virtually no role in public culture.

Dyke culture's long-standing opposition to middle-class values is one of its most vital and empowering aspects. But the impossibility of middle-class existence for dykes means that we still have to deal with some aspects of homophobia that have been ameliorated for gay men.

Economic disempowerment leaves people more open to the blows of discrimination. Middle-class jobs do not tolerate lesbian attitudes or attire because they suggest that the prospective employee is not already a member of the middle class -- a sin greater even than private perversion.

Navigating the mainstream world is, nonetheless, a necessary evil, and the ability to maintain a distinct cultural identity in the process makes it more palatable. This task poses problems for all minorities, but more so for lesbians than gay men.

Gay men can bring their queer eye to the larger world because they always have: American gay culture developed, beginning in World War I, among a cluster of men involved with fashion and theater in New York. Because the differences aren't as politically fraught for gay men, the gay community is not as divided by questions of visibility and outness as the lesbian community. In many ways, gay male culture stylizes the "good taste" spending power allows. The middle class loves this about gay men.

The arts, journalism, even politics: All have openly gay men in prominent positions. All have a marked dearth of out lesbians. The numbers may be different in the Bay Area, but the proportions are not.

The vacuum left by the absence of dykes in the public sphere exerts its influence in complex, indefinable ways, making it a major challenge of out life.

We ought at least to hear the resounding silence of the L word when we chat in self-congratulatory fashion about all things.